Joe Edd Morris’s majestic new novel Torched takes the reader into the cauldron of 1964 Mississippi where racial tensions exploded into precipitous violence, an upheaval that would ultimately lead to the uneven progress of the ensuing years. Morris’s compelling narrator Sam Ransom enters into this turmoil as a young man of the cloth, a white southerner whose childhood was blessed by his relationships with two black friends Early and Sharon Rose and with the black preacher Uncle Giles. Brave, wise, and preternaturally restrained, Uncle Giles serves as the moral lodestone for both Sam and the entire novel.
Confronted with the specter of attacks on African-American churches and communities, Sam struggles mightily with his loyalties to serving his local churches as assistant pastor and to abiding by his sense of decency in trying to help southern blacks in their call for basic rights. Sam’s internal struggles are psychologically astute and remarkably nuanced, capturing the ethical tenuousness of a white southerner who can only see so clearly through the prism of his race and heritage. His reacquaintance with those childhood friends Early and Sharon Rose will give his subsequent decisions an urgency and a force that are both inspiring and unreservedly intense.
This tension is fueled by the looming presence of the Klan, its members endlessly intimidating and faithfully backing their threats with burnings and murders. And into this turmoil is a correspondingly passionate interracial romance between Sam and Sharon Rose. In the midst of their commitment to the cause, the lovers are deliciously conflicted: “Guilt became a hot wind whipping through the windows.” Without giving away too much of the plot, let’s just say wondrous actions will transpire at the burnt-out black church – a church that the civil rights leaders are determined to rebuild and that the Klan is equally committed to destroy. Man, oh man, Torched builds such suspense that the final half of the novel is absolutely riveting.
Joe Edd Morris can flat-out write. He evokes places, characters, and historical moments with eloquence and resonance. A typical passage reads, “I thought of Early’s hostility and wondered again what had happened to our childhood camaraderie, those bonds of adventure and risk, imagined dangers and dramatic escapes. … I thought of lazy summer days we lay on cushions of clover and gazed at the sky and solved our salvation beneath puzzles and the word ‘drift’ came to mind. The winds of our cultures had blown us apart.”
Ultimately, Torched is simply a great story about the racial complexities situated at the locus of the American psyche. The novel captures one of the central events of the Twentieth Century in poignantly human terms. The reader cannot help but care deeply about Sam, Sharon Rose, and especially the mercurial Early who seems to carry on his thin shoulders all of the suffering and anguish piled onto black America. Indeed, the latter portions of the novel are fraught with ironies and memories alternately vexing and ennobling. Yes, Torched is so redolent with that Summer of 1964 that it stays with reader as if it’s his own indelible reminiscence.
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